Coming over some mountain pass in the taiga and reception comes back on the radio out of nowhere, it’s the classic rock station playing Led Zeppelin’s All My Love, and it comes on as John Paul Jones’ wizardly baroque synth solo is playing, and you crest some big height in the road and a valley opens up before you vaster than anything, Roger Dean green mountains with 10,000 foot waterfalls climbing up forbidding dark crags above the treeline, glaciers snaking over them as it transitions to Jimmy Page’s answering guitar solo, simple phrases on the nylon string, and as Robert Plant’s vocals kick back in, he is a feather in the wind, you remember it’s about the guy who killed his son in a car accident and you’re going 140 in a 3 ton rental truck.
I loved Alaska. Saw bears but the best animal was the Arctic ground squirrel. They come up and gnaw on your boots. The salmon run was going on, that was the big metaphor. Work is a salmon run, I am a salmon, etc. Dying salmon fighting each other, manic, hunks of flesh rotting off, just to mate once and die. The salmon don’t travel up the river as bros. They clamp on each other’s snouts with jagged crocodile teeth and thrash around. Over salmon pussy that’s still miles upstream. There’s a word for it, where you fuck once and die. Semelparity. How good does that nut feel and what happens after.
God is always telling you something. The trees have spirits. The birches are friendly. Back in LA and the air hurts my eyes. Garbage truck going by, et cetera. I did not get lost and starve in trackless wastes. I can remember the squirrels now and the sound of the river. Mirror lake with wooded islands and waterfowl. Mama duck with an impossibly long line of ducklings gliding across the water. They’re still there somewhere.
delicioustacos 
But Alaska is oh so much older than friendly L.A. weather …
Sounds like you just skimmed the wikipedia about “salmon run” and came to the conclusion that male salmons fighting each other is futile. There’s a complex reason why male salmon fight each other. You assume there’s a 1-male to 1-female availability, and that mating opportunities are abundant once they reach breeding area. But is that correct? And is your analogy between humans and salmon an accurate one?
Search “why do salmon fight” which will return an excerpt result from:
“Observations of spawning behaviour in Salmoninae: Salmo, Oncorhynchus and Salvelinus”
Salmon don’t have to deal with african-salmon causing crime and murders, which made previous spawning pools unlivable, thus driving other salmon to fewer and fewer mating areas. Salmon don’t need to earn incomes to survive, they just feast in the open ocean. Salmon don’t need to pay for rent, student loans, taxes, insurance, senior care for their parents, or a mortgage. Female salmon make their own nests for their eggs, and they must compete to do so because there is not unlimited room on the riverbed. Salmon don’t have to deal with big-nose parasitic kosher-salmon who push feminism, debt, and degeneracy onto the other populations of salmon. There isn’t an elite group of billionaire salmons who quietly control and manipulate laws to make life and reproduction harder for the salmon.
So whilst there are many parallels between salmon and humans, as you can see, the human condition is far more challenging and complicated. But DelTacos just cares about witty tweetable remarks, and his midwit audience eats it all up without thinking deeper. You don’t need to think, Tacos did it for you, so you should just buy his book to support him. We’re all bros, after all. We’re all going to be millionaires and retire to the Philippines with beautiful hot young wives. We’re all going to make it 😉
P.S. Atlantic salmon don’t mate once and die, they can survive the freshwater and repeat the process over and over again. Only pacificuck salmon mate once (if they’re lucky) and die rotting in the rivers. Perhaps there’s a good metaphor there about west coast vs. east coast.
thank god there’s a pedant and a racist here to ruin the post
You “salmon-needs” both sound like total faggots.
You’re reading alot like Vonnegut now….watch out.